Monday, 24 February 2014

It was wonderful to see Cocteau’s the BFI’s touring restoration of La Belle et La Bete on the big screen yesterday. It’s one of those films which has been with me since my teens, and every time I see it reminds me of previous cinema viewings, at different points of my life – at the Scala, The Everyman or on one or other of the NFT screens. Your response to beloved films changes and develops over the years (as, hopefully, you yourself change), so you see it in a different light each time. Something about their basic appeal remains the same, though. I’ve always loved Cocteau’s dream castle, and in particular the living statues and animate arm torch sconces and curtain raisers. The arms move with docile submission to light the passage of those passing, whilst the eyes of the statues and caryatids follow the to and fro of the regular evening exchanges between Beauty and the Beast, or anxiously track Beauty’s restless pacing as she awaits the Beast’s arrival. The white statue in Belle’s bedroom, which balances a circular candle-bearing plate on its head like a heavy halo, looks on with a small, smug smile of quiet schadenfreude as the Beast enters in a state of dishevelled distress, driven to look on Belle only to find she’s not there. This alabaster feminine statue, whose amusement makes it clear that the Beast has invaded territory in which he is not master, is contrasted with those in other parts of the castle, which are male and carved of darker, granitic stone. Male and female territorial zones are thus demarcated.

It’s a sacred female space which is revealed to be the source of the Beast’s power, as well as the dumping ground for his glittering but useless treasure. This forbidden grove is contained within an ivy-cloaked glass-house, from the roof of which radiant light shafts (light which we mentally shade an amber gold). The grove is guarded by the statue of Diana, and when the glass is broken by the oafish men who would steal the Beast’s treasure and destroy his power (which are her treasure and power), she comes to life and punishes their transgression with an arrow which brings death and transformation: the revelation of the bestial nature beneath the toothsome smile and honeyed words. The Beast, of course, undergoes a similar transformation; his lifeforce is restored and an instant dandyish countenance and costume springs (with a visually literal figurativeness) into being. It’s always seemed a rather disappointing conclusion. Belle has started to love her Beast, and there seems a definite hesitancy and regret that he has disappeared so suddenly. But she decides to play along with this new pantalooned and beruffed creature, who insists that he is one and the same beast who gave his heart and life to her. Perhaps she is thinking that, in time, she can bring the dear, savage old Beast out again. And they can return to live in the enchanted castle in the forest, figures of fearful myth and awful warning, and so untroubled by tiresome strangers, challenging, calculating suitors and squabbling socialite sisters. And he can lay his furred head in her lap and, eyes shining brightly as he gazes up at her with utter, unswerving devotion, lap up water from the cupped grail of her hands.

Wednesday, 19 February 2014

The Christmas Ghost Stories of Lawrence Gordon Clark is the first in the Spectral Press’ projected Spectral Screen series, and they’ve set out in fine style with a collection centring around the adaptations of M.R.James’ classic ghost stories which Lawrence Gordon Clark made for television in the 1970s. It’s the perfect time for such a volume to be published, given the recent BFI release of a box set containing all of the Ghost Stories for Christmas, hauled out from the cobwebbed vaults of the BBC at last. An introduction from Mark Gatiss provides a stamp of approval. It's a weighty mark of admiration from one who has become the semi-official curator and historian of horror and the fantastic on the BBC, and who has continued Clark’s legacy with his own James adaptation, The Tractate Middoth, in addition to producing a sensitive and insightful documentary on James’ life, work and influence. The original M.R.James stories which were the basis of the films are presented here in the order of their adaptation, and are accompanied by small but richly atmospheric black and white illustrations drawn by Nick Gucker. In addition to the five made for the BBC between 1971-5 (The Stalls of Barchester, A Warning to the Curious, Lost Hearts, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and The Ash Tree), there is also the one that got away (Count Magnus, scripted but never produced), and the story which Clark directed and produced for ITV Playhouse in 1979, Casting the Runes.

All are introduced with comments from Lawrence Gordon Clark himself. He goes into further detail about his James films in an appendix of generous length, compiled from two interviews conducted by the book’s editor Tony Earnshaw at the Halifax Ghost Story Festival in 2010 and 2012. Earnshaw, in his foreword, expresses his admiration for Clark’s work and accounts him a friend. Clark’s commentaries and transcribed observations arise from this ground of friendship, which allows for the confidence of ease and intimacy. He is clearly aware that he is in amicable company which is fully appreciative of his achievements, and that this is his opportunity to expound in some detail upon his work; to provide a definitive artistic statement, in essence, which is what this book offers.

His introductory comments to the stories make his love of and insight into James’s fiction evident, and he is sensitive to the requirements of translating the chill sense of dread conveyed by the precisely controlled language into an analogous visual style. It was Clark who first brought the idea of producing a dramatisation of a James story to the BBC departmental head Paul Fox, suggesting The Stalls of Barchester as a perfect choice for adaptation. He made the connection between James’ festive narration of his shudder-inducing stories to his pupils around the warm fireplace in his study and the idea of a late night BBC ghost story for Christmas. The gathering around the fire metamorphosed into the settling down in front of the glowing screen. But the sense of fear and dread anticipation made pleasurable by the warm, homely surroundings remained the same.

Clark is a great admirer of James as a writer, at one point declaring that ‘he was a genius’. His knowledge of his oeuvre make this as much a work of literary criticism on his part as it is an explanation of his own methods and intentions as a film-maker. He rightly identifies James as a ‘small room’ writer, who builds up a rational and classically ordered narrative surface, often involving books or the written word in some form or another, which he then subtly and systematically undermines. There’s generally a climactic moment in the story when he uses a telling phrase to create what Clark calls the ‘Jamesian effect’; the sudden opening of an abyss within which the nature of his malevolent revenants and pitiless guardians comes into momentarily sharp and horrific focus. In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, the damp, leather bag which the unwise treasure seeker tries to pull out of an excavated hole in the abbey wall ‘slipped forward onto my chest, and put its arms around my neck’. In A Warning to the Curious, the narrator and his companion chase after another treasure-seeker whose excavations unearth a terrible nemesis. He is in turn relentlessly pursued along the Suffolk shore by a dimly perceived figure. The two concerned acquaintances of this doomed amateur archaeologist come across two sets of footprints in the sand, the latter ‘the track of a bare foot, and one that showed more bones than flesh’. In The Stalls of Barchester, the nature of the spirit which will haunt the guilty protagonist in the dark recesses of the cathedral and in the shadowy corridors of his own home is revealed in the description of the cowled figure (cowled figure being a recurrent feature of James stories) carved in the wood of the stalls: ‘the sunken features and, horrid to relate, the rent flesh upon the cheek bones’.

The cowled figure - The Treasure of Abbot Thomas

Clark translates these Jamesian effects into instants of visual terror, moments of awful insight. The cowled, bony-clawed figure on the stairs in The Stalls of Barchester, the the pale, bloodless face glimpsed in free-rolling torchlight in A Warning to the Curious, the abrupt, purposeful approach of a monkishly robed towards the helpless protagonist in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, the gaunt and pallid, long-nailed children raking the windowpane with their long-fingernails in Lost Hearts, and the scuttling balls of darkness plopping onto the bedroom floor in The Ash Tree (these latter grotesque emanations from James’ arachnophobic nightmares).

The Val Lewton night walk - Isle of the Dead

Clark reveals how important it was for him to tell the stories visually, with a minimum of dialogue. The Stalls of Barchester benefited from its retrospectively revealed narrative, allowing for expository readings which echoed James’ telling of the tale from the protagonist’s progressively desperate diaristic viewpoint. A Warning to the Curious was envisaged in terms of a silent film, the silences of the wide-open landscape creating their own portentous sense of inherent, threatening presence. Clark cites Hitchcock as a primary influence in this respect, and like Hitch, he produced his own storyboards so that he the sequences to be shot each day were ready-mapped out in his head. As Tony Earnshaw points out in his introduction, these are genuinely cinematic films rather than TV plays. Earnshaw’s comparison to the films produced by Val Lewton in the 1940s points to the heady blend of highly literate writing and exquisite visual style (readily evident in the silent ‘night-walk’ sequences which were a feature of Lewton pictures). Jacques Tourneur, who directed Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man, the first three of the classic Lewton horror films, went on to make the only feature length adaptation of a M.R.James story, The Night of the Demon (1957), which freely drew on the story Casting the Runes.

Threat in open spaces - Casting the Runes

Clark expresses his admiration for that film, although he feels that it includes a certain amount of padding to puff it out to feature length. He made his own version, set in the modern day, for ITV Playhouse in 1979. He confesses in the Earnshaw interview to being ‘rather ashamed of it’. But he really has no need to. There are some fine scenes, even if others, in which he experiments with video techniques, struggles with unsympathetic studio set ups, and is saddled with an over-literal and unconvincing variant on James’ revolting arachnoid beasts (whose inadequacies are cruelly exposed under the bright lighting) are less successful. The hexed film, in which a message of impending death is inserted without any evidence of splicing, anticipates the cursed videotape of Ring; the same idea a technological step ahead. The most effective scenes take place in a wintry, snow-dusted farm field, framed by the dark stone arch of the railway bridge which acts as an ominous gateway to its open space (which at the same time has the feeling of being enclosed and imprisoning). A silhouetted, statuesque figure in the middle of the field strikes a predatory pose, like a poised cathedral gargoyle. In the blinking of an eye, it is instantly present at the mouth of the bridge’s tunnel. It’s a terrifying moment (ably enhanced by disconcerting electronic sound), and strongly brings to mind the weeping angels from Dr Who. It’s an example of what Clark refers to as ‘threat from wide open spaces’; from the nemesis which is dimly visible in the far or middle distance, but which is nevertheless inescapable, no matter how far or fast you run. This is certainly true of the unfortunate Paxton in A Warning to the Curious, who runs with all the swiftness that fear affords across the flat expanses of the Sussex shore in an attempt to evade his relentless revenant pursuer, who never seems to slow or tire.

Clark was particularly adept at finding atmospheric locations which were the perfect analogue for the settings of James’ stories. He would search for them himself, viewing them as fundamental to the substance of the film. Those in A Warning to the Curious were a particularly inspired choice on his part. Holkham on the Norfolk coast proved a wonderful stand-in for James’ Aldeburgh setting. The discovery of the remains of an old barrow disguised by a stand of pines rising at the far point of the shoreline’s curve was an example of the kind of serendipity which location filming allowed for. The autumn mists and fogs in Lost Hearts, which are so beautifully shot, are a great example of working with the prevailing conditions. Tight schedules meant that there was no question of waiting around for the weather to clear. With an eye open to the possibilities of the moment, however, unplanned but magical shots such as these could be incorporated. Clark welcomed such possibilities, and moulded the details of the story around them. That’s why his films are imbued with such a powerful sense of place.

He was also open to the mercurial moods of the English weather. Each film is in a sense a seasonal tone poem. A Warning to the Curious and Casting the Runes are both wintry, whereas Lost Hearts is autumnal and The Ash Tree summery and fecund (hideously so in the end). Clark also captures the contrasts between the daylit world and the hours of darkness, building a sense of impending dread as the evening shadows lengthen. There are some lovely shots of the bulbous, orange winter sun as it nears the horizon in A Warning to the Curious and Lost Hearts. But he also frames James’ terrors in broad daylight, when they become all the more palpably real, no longer half-glimpsed extensions of the deeper shadows.

Cornish seascapes - The Ash Tree

The Ash Tree was filmed in Cornwall, partly outside Clark’s own home at Bokelly, which happened to have an overgrown ash tree in its gardens; and partly at the Elizabethan house at Prideaux Place near Padstow. There are some lovely scenes of Edward Petherbridge’s character Sir Richard riding along the clifftops, the sea shimmering below. The stark, granite tors of Bodmin Moor are also used to great effect, providing an externalised landscape which perfectly embodies the acts of pitiless human barbarity, disguised beneath a cloak of moral authority, which culminate on its slopes.

Psychological landscapes - the Cornish moors in The Ash Tree

My own slight point of disagreement with Lawrence Gordon Clark’s view of his own work concerns his difficulties with the direction of David Rudkin’s script for The Ash Tree. He felt that Rudkin was too forgiving of Mrs Mothersole, the vengeful witch in the story, whose curse spans generations. James’ ghosts and demons, he felt, were ‘actively evil’, and should evoke nothing but terror and revulsion. The child revenants in Lost Hearts are an exception, their revenge rightful and redemptive. Rudkin’s interpretation of James’ tale of witchcraft focuses on the way in which the spirit is warped and twisted, malevolent impulses forming through subjection to the violent and perverse judgements of ruling powers which have their own dark and hidden motivations. Rudkin and Clark are certainly approaching James from differing perspectives. Clark is the classicist, who wants to bring him to the screen in a pure visual translation of the prose. Rudkin looks beneath the surface, trying to uncover what creates the spirit of evil, and what subconscious feelings James might be exploring. His adaptation of The Ash Tree dovetails with the concerns of his plays and TV dramas, making this a notable example of a balanced collaboration between writer and director.

Clark was in some ways a classic auteur when it came to the Christmas ghost stories. He certainly sees the director as the principal creative force in the making of a film. This might be in close partnership with the writer, but he doesn’t see the script as sacrosanct. The director must be able to adapt to circumstances (including those thrown up by the fortunes and hazards of location shooting) as the filming progresses, he feels, and this may very well involve altering the script extensively. For the first two films (The Stalls of Barchester and A Warning to the Curious), he was director, producer and writer, left to his own devices to prove his worth. He was, to an extent, a victim of his success. The great popularity of A Warning to the Curious ensured that the Christmas ghost stories would be continued. For the next, Lost Hearts, the BBC drama department insisted on becoming involved so that things could be done ‘properly’. This meant bringing in separate producers and scriptwriters, with the differences of artistic perspective which such divisions were bound to entail. Nevertheless, Clark managed, through a mixture of diplomatic tact and clearsighted persuasiveness, to maintain the tone of restrained unease and the strong sense of place which he had established in the first two films; to carry on doing things his way, by and large.

Clark is never less than generous in his acknowledgment of the contributions of his collaborators. He expresses huge gratitude to Paul Fox, the BBC head who gave him the chance to direct, write and produce the first James adaptation (following on from Jonathan Miller’s highly individualistic take on Whistle and I’ll Come to You made for Omnibus in 1968). This was taking a chance on Fox’s part, given that Clark was at the time a documentary maker, wholly untested when it came to the very different discipline of creating a work of fiction. Clark is scathing, in his own understated yet unalloyed fashion, about the post-Birt managerial bureaucracies and production committees at the BBC. He makes it clear that there would now be no possibility of someone like him being allowed to make that first film with such creative leeway. Nor would the BBC provide the long-term investment to develop the talents of film-makers and technicians, such that they would have the confidence to put themselves forward for such a project. Creative freedom and experiment is no longer a priority, he laments. There is now too much interference from ‘bottle washers’.

The doomed seeker - Peter Vaughan in A Warning to the Curious

Clark is fulsome in his praise for John McGlashan, his cinematographer on the five BBC James adaptations. He holds him up as a vital collaborator, to the extent of effectively being the co-creator of the particular ambience of the films. He also points to the key contribution made by the sound recorder Dick Marton, who captured in uncanny close-up those small noises which are amplified in the dark hours into sounds pregnant with obscure terror. He also pays tribute to his casts, in particular Robert Hardy in The Stalls of Barchester, Peter Vaughan in A Warning to the Curious, who brings such sympathy and pathos to his character, and Michael Bryant in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, who so memorably portrays the withering of his character’s rational certainties. Clark sees them as having perfectly embodied the isolated, guilt-ridden or arrogantly hubristic Jamesian protagonist. He comes across as a generous collaborator, even if he does hold out for the director’s ultimate word on creative matters. He delights in the unique contributions which others can make, and encourages them to bring their own particular talents to bear on the production. It is this quality which undoubtedly allowed him to continue to make the films which he wanted to, even after he’d had to cede the complete control which he’d initially enjoyed. He maintained a very good working relationship with his producer, Rosemary Hill, despite some basic differences in approach. In short, Clark appears to be a perfect gentleman, the polar opposite of legendarily tyrannical directors who command from a lofty height.

The malice of inanimate objects - Robert Hardy in The Stalls of Barchester

Further appendices provide us with a bibliography and biographical sketch of M.R.James, a Lawrence Gordon Clark filmography and a summary of his awards. I was intrigued to learn of the four James tales not included in the Collected Ghost Stories. The title of one of these, The Malice of Inanimate Objects, neatly encapsulates one of the key attributes of his fiction. I was also surprised to discover that there had been a TV adaptation of The Tractate Middoth prior to Mark Gatiss’ recent version; and that this one was made for US television (James seeming such a peculiarly English writer) as a 1952 episode of the Lights Out series, featuring Leslie Nielsen as the young librarian who grows to regret his eagerness to help out. The filmography demonstrates Clark’s range and versatility as a director. He turned his hand to comic action and detection (Minder and Pie in the Sky), costume drama (Flambards), the political thriller (winning awards for Harry’s Game), historical romance (Jamaica Inn) and medical drama (Casualty). There were more excursions into the fantastic, too. Although it received a mixed reaction, I think the elegiac, downbeat Quatermass series which he directed in 1979 was a fine piece of work. Once more he demonstrated his facility for finding perfect locations and capturing their inherent spirit. He evoked both a palpable sense of urban decay and social degeneration in the London scenes, and the latent magic with which the ancient downland landscapes of southern England is charged.

The bookish investigator - The Stalls of Barchester

It’s wonderful that this book offers Lawrence Gordon Clark the space to give such a full and in depth account of his lovingly crafted screen renditions of M.R.James’ subtly suggestive supernatural terrors. Through the juxtaposition of his artistic self-analyses with his observations on James’ fiction, and with the inclusion of the original tales themselves, this becomes a celebration of two masters of the venerable English ghost story tradition.

Wednesday, 5 February 2014

Blood On Satan's Claw is playing in a fantastic double bill with Ben Wheatley's A Field in England this Friday at the Black Swan in York, beginning at 7PM and with an introduction by writer Gavin Baddeley. Two great, great films put on by the estimable Fiendish Thingee. Come and enjoy the country air, but take care not to stray from the path. Following on from the notes on A Field in England, here are some circular thoughts on the other half of the bill.

A film with a title like Blood On Satan’s Claw, splashed on a poster and represented with blunt literalness by a fiendishly taloned paw dipped in gore, might not seem to promise anything from the more refined end of the arthouse cinematic spectrum. The words scream out in lurid red letters, letting you know in no uncertain terms that this will be a rough and ready piece of raw exploitation, a bubbling stew of sex and violence which takes full advantage of the new liberal censorship regime of the early 70s. Shocking in all senses of the word. This might indeed be the primary attraction for certain casual viewers, the poster enticing passersby into the cinema who are looking for precisely for these kinds of potent, slightly grubby thrills. It was certainly the impression that Soho movie hustler and old school East End character Tony Tenser, whose Tigon production company was behind the film, wanted to make. He was concerned with making money, and artistic considerations were not high on his priorities. Having said which, he was responsible for a small clutch of genuine classics in the 60s and early 70s, including Roman Polanski’s first two British features, Repulsion and Cul de Sac.

US poster under a different title (just to confuse things)

If the film fails to live up to the expectations aroused by the grasping, bloody claws and the naked flesh which they are poised to rake, there may be a low chorus of disgruntled muttering in the lobby on the way out. We anticipate some lurid and titillating scenes from the offset, murkily and prosaically shot on cheap and hastily erected sets. So the opening scene comes as a considerable and, hopefully, pleasant surprise. It establishes the tone of the film, and immediately introduces some of its prevailing themes. And far from being lurid, shocking and contemptuously cheap, it’s poetic, expertly shot and quite ravishingly beautiful. But don’t worry. There will be disreputable pleasures too.

Pastoral and rustic still life

The opening shot is a highly formal blend of rural still life and agricultural landscape. An open, grassy slope, seen in close up from a low, ground level angle, takes up the majority of the screen’s space. Apples, a hunk of bread tucked into a leather pouch and an earthenware jug, presumably filled with cider, are neatly arrayed on the left of the frame – a ploughman’s lunch. And there’s the ploughman, a small figure in the middle distance moving across from the right of the frame. He treads out the horizon, outlined against the narrow strip of sky at the top of the screen. It’s a beautiful composition, almost painterly in its considered balance of elements and division of space. There are other compositions like this scattered through the film, including a lovely shot of a torchlit procession marching in the distance in evenly spaced rank across an evening field. We then get a close up of the soil being turned over by a horse-drawn wooden plough, again shot from ground level. This is a stylistic choice which director Piers Haggard and cameraman Dick Bush (both ex-BBC men) make throughout the film. Haggard is an avowed fan of Japanese cinema, and this may have had some influence in this respect. Yasujiro Ozu was known for his low-angle shots, and the camera in Japanese films often descends to a low angle to share the kneeling perspective of characters in domestic rooms, royal palaces or temples.

Torchlit procession

This ground-level view works on psychological and symbolic levels. It’s an unconventional and disorientating perspective to watch from, and sets the perceptions a little aslant. It also lends the impression that the surface of the world is provisional, a thin skin with deep, accreted layers, both geological and temporal, lying beneath. Forces long-buried and all-but forgotten spirits may worm their way to the surface and re-emerge, the genius loci of centuries past which never wholly dies but diffuses through the soil and reconstitutes itself when the climate is favourable. The low-angled shot is also used to good effect in the haunted attic scenes, creating a sense of incipient unease and suggesting that there is something lurking beneath the floorboards. The attic is the classic symbolic locus of the subconscious in gothic film and fiction, from Jane Eyre through The Owl Service to the Exorcist. It’s the dusty substratum of the mind, its hidden inhabitants, boarded up and kept from the light, waiting to burst through with all the violence built up through years of incarceration.

Ground level shots - the provisional surface

Back to our ploughman; we first gain a proper view of him via his shoes, a rare close-up of period costume footwear. They look authentic enough to my inexpert eye, and are an immediate example of the attention to fine detail which is evident throughout. This can be seen in minor elements such as the use of rush lights, set down in bracket holders, the poignantly half-finished needlework circle left by the fire, and the wooden cage for a pet songbird hung from the ceiling. They all combine to create real depth to the 17th century atmosphere conjured by the set designer Arnold Chapkis. The film-makers were lucky enough to find a perfect period farmhouse in the Bix Bottom Valley for the exteriors of the principal locale in the first part of the film. But the set design for the interiors is equally impressive. It creates a solidly real, lived-in setting, which makes the fantastic and horrific events which are played out within it all the more disconcerting, a disturbing eruption of the irrational into the everyday.

Period fireside detail

This care in creating a believable sense of period extends to the dialogue. There is a real attempt to create a sense of rural speech, with many a ‘she’m’, ‘b’aint’ and ‘it be’ scattered throughout. The odd RADA or RSC vowel slips through, this not being a mode of speech actors are commonly called upon to essay. But it’s a refreshing change from the peasantry in Hammer films and their imitators. They are generally middle Europeans (nominally, at least), but the English character actors who portray them tend to slip at the drop of a hat into a disgruntled cockney shtick of the kind they might use in a BBC Dickens. This is perfectly alright in the context of Hammer’s fairytale worlds. Blood On Satan’s Claw is intent on building a more authentic environment, however. It also creates a sense of a village community defined through the divisions of labour evident throughout. The ploughman, Ralph (Barry Andrews), works for Mistress Banham (Avice Landon), who owns the large house and its surrounding farmland. She also employs Ellen Vespers (Charlotte Mitchell), another of the central adult characters in the film, who works as her domestic servant. The village authorities are represented by the temporarily resident judge (Patrick Wymark), the buffoonish squire (an amusing turn by James Hayter), the unworldly vicar (Anthony Ainley) and, to a lesser or more delimited extent, the ineffectual doctor (Howard Goorney). The peasants do share a general air of disgruntlement and a tendency to mob-handed violence with their Hammer brethren, however. This is treated with a certain amount of wryly self-aware humour by the film-makers. A member of a search party roused by the squire, setting out into the steady rain, mutters ‘silly old fool. Why don’t he go and search his bloody self’. And when the pitchfork and torch-wielding mob heads for the traditional climactic confrontation and conflagration, not a few of the stout locals decide to remain behind and look after the large kegs of ale which have been set up in the churchyard to steel the nerves.

Answer echoes answer - Cathy calls across the valley

The work of Ralph the ploughman (to whom we once more return) is effortful. The soil yields reluctantly to the blunt blade guided by the straining figure who controls the machinery whilst also holding the reins of the horse which draws it forward. This is no sun-dappled eulogy to the purity of the agricultural life. It’s hard labour, carried out against a winter landscape whose predominant tones are dark brown. But there is a lyrical element of English pastoral romanticism here and throughout the film. Ralph pauses in his work to call back across the valley to his sweetheart Cathy (Wendy Padbury), and we see him from her perspective, a small, waving figure against the woods. Ralph and Cathy will remain the innocent heart of the film whilst all around them steadily succumb to devilish enchantment or the hysteria of fear, superstition and rumour. The call across the valley gives us a sense of the dimensions of this local space, and for a moment we seem to be in the territory of AE Houseman and A Shropshire Lad. But then Ralph ploughs up the devil, a head like a grotesque turnip inserted with a glistening eyeball, across which a wet worm inches. It’s the kind of picture which might have graced the cover of a Pan Book of Horror paperback at the time the film was made. I certainly can’t recall any such imagery turning up in any AE Houseman poem I’ve come across.

The devil's turnip - unearthing evil

The devil is gradually and methodically built up from various donated body parts throughout the film, gifted with varying degrees of willingness. We don’t actually get to see much of it, though. It’s no doubt a conscious choice on the part of the director, who’s well aware that what is suggested, or glimpsed in the peripheral shadows of vision, is liable to be more disturbing than what is revealed in the full glare of sun or firelight (particularly on a low budget). But his absence from the greater part of the story is also an indication that this is not the Devil of Revelations-riffling, Carl Orff-chorusing films of fundamentalist orthodoxy to come such as The Exorcist or The Omen. Nor is it the Hellfire Club Devil of salacious Satanists conjured up in Dennis Wheatley adaptations and variations. The offhand climactic unveiling of the near-wholly embodied demon is, in the end, a cursory observance of the required generic formula. But rather than a figure from the St James Bible, it’s a creature of deep folk memory, a product of the danker corners of the natural world, with the sort of half-formed, gurning features which might have emerged from the imagination of a medieval engraver or wood-carver. Indeed, you can find just such creatures in the shadows of Ashcombe church near Exeter in Devon. Its odd, hopping gait (it’s still waiting for that vital last limb to be supplied) adds to a general air of rank toadiness. Indeed, it’s not dissimilar to one of the devils depicted in Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages.

High priestess of the Dionysian cult - Angel Blake (Linda Hayden)

The physical manifestation which is the source of the malignancy which spreads like a plague through the village is not particularly important. It is the youth cult which emerges and gathers strength and numbers through its guiding spirit, and under the beguiling leadership of its high priestess Angel Blake (Linda Hayden), which forms the central focus of the story. This cult is Dionysian rather than Satanic, a re-birth of old rites and revels, with their attendant sacrifices, which rise to the surface at periodic intervals. There are contemporary parallels with the children’s crusades of the 60s and early 70s, with their wholesale mistrust and rejection of the ‘straight’ adult world. Given that the intoxication of the children leads to cruel indifference of other’s suffering, an absolute us and them division, and orgiastic gatherings which climax in ritualistic murder, this could even be seen as a somewhat reactionary film, reacting with conservative revulsion to the ongoing upheavals stemming from the previous decade.

Jack in the Green

The Dionysian cultists take to the woods for their rites. They appropriate a decorously ruined church (also to be found in Bix Bottom Valley), its remaining stonework held together by the binding roots of ivy, and reconsecrate it for their own heathen purposes. A direct parallel is drawn between this sacred grove and the village church, where attendance at Sunday school steadily dwindles to a stubbornly uncorruptable remnant. We cut from the vicar’s vexations at the empty benches facing his pulpit to the mist-shrouded pagan altar around which the children are gathered. The reversion to the old ways is also suggested by the two boys who become mischievious woodland sprites. We see them peering out through concealing branches and tangles of undergrowth, wicked grins permanently splitting their faces as they contemplate further gleeful pranks. One of them has sharp, elfin features and dresses in Lincoln green, a playfully murderous spirit of the greenwood waiting to lead the unwary astray. The other is a carrot-topped, freckle-faced boy, a Just William whose naughtiness and anarchic japes have crossed the line into active malevolence and evildoing.

May blossom frame

There are several scenes set on the borders of the woodland, with shots looking out from the trees into the fields, ‘innocent’ characters framed by dark winter branches or haloed by sprays of May blossom. The woodland path winding down the slope to Ellen’s cottage is trodden repeatedly, but becomes increasingly vulnerable to the lurking cultists. It forms a borderland between the two territories. The woodland is the wild place beyond the edge of the tamed natural environment of the agricultural landscape. It’s a potent symbol of the deeper, more tangled recesses of the human psyche.

Borderlands - The path through the woods

Back to the beginning again. We see the look of revulsion on Ralph’s face as he looks down at the unspeakable horror he has unwittingly excavated. It’s not so much a skull as it is a dessicated head, a bogman burial compressed and preserved from centuries packed beneath layers of soil until it is a thing of tilth and flint as much as flesh and bone. We get a worm’s eye view looking wetly back up at Ralph, the turnip-head’s eyeball staring him out with mesmeric fixity. A crow hopping on ploughed ridges amongst scattered feathers presages the discovery. Has it supplied the eyeball which it the first step towards the devil’s re-embodiment, granting it vision of the world once more? The crow (or a crow) turns up at various moments in the film, watching proceedings with beadily blinking vigilance from a variety of dark, gnarled branches. It is an emblem of the cruel indifference of nature, a carrion silhouette which seeks out the dead, and has often been taken for death’s uncanny harbinger.

The crow looks on from the edgelands

The resurrection of the devil in the film can be seen as marking the return of nature in its more unrelentingly predatory aspect; a nature which is as much about death as it is about life, the one deriving from the other. The fey flower children of the 60s saw a return to nature as a reclamation of a state of innocence lost in the process of civilisation, industrialisation and the migration to ever-swelling cities. ‘We’ve got to get back to the garden’, as Joni sang in Woodstock. But the children of nature in Blood on Satan’s Claw are very far from being gentle hippies, at one with the birds and trees. The nature with which the cultists are in tune is the way of bloodsoaked predation, which relishes the luring, stalking and dispatch of the prey. Nature red in tooth and (Satanic) claw. This is ignoble rather than noble savagery, self-consciously delighting in its own pitiless viciousness.

All God's creatures - the vicar and the harmless serpent

Sex is part of this return to nature in the raw, too. Romantic love plays no part in it, it is purely and simply a procreative impulse towards the furtherance of one’s own kind – the devil’s kind, in this case. When Peter, the son of Mistress Banham, sees his betrothed led down the stairs from the attic in which she has encountered the reborn spirit of the field demon, she is no longer the coy bride to be of the previous day. She throws him a look of frank lasciviousness which makes it clear that she is now possessed of a carnal knowledge and hunger, and figuratively wants to eat him up. Angel Clare is similarly possessed. As the film progresses, she grows more and more to resemble a lupine creature of the old wilds. Her eyebrows grow dark and bushy and slope upwards with hungry animal alertness, and her cheeks become flushed with the arousal of the predatory carnivore sensing its kill. Close-ups of her blue-grey eyes also make for a very lycanthropic, wolfen look. In contrast, the vicar is a passive lamb, led off to the slaughter when Angel, putting on a mask of wounded innocence, accuses him of abuse and murder. He keeps nature tamed and domesticated in the form of his pet rabbit, tethered to his desk and hand fed. It’s a symbolic representation of his own carefully corralled nature. He is first encountered studying a slow worm he has discovered at the edge of the woodland (that borderland between states), declaring that all animal’s are God’s creatures. This writhing serpent is, contrary to appearances, a harmless beast. He is aware of this, and allows it to slither up his sleeve. Evil, or predatory and poisonous nature, is just as likely to take a pleasing form, as he will later discover.

One more time to the beginning. We move from the shot of Ralph looking down at the head, and the head staring back at him, and arrive at the title sequence. This is heralded by a full-beak close-up of the crow blinking its empty, black eyes, perched impassively on its branch. We are then introducued to the opening, stridulant strokes of Marc Wilkinson’s extraordinary score, which seem to echo the twitching movements of the bird. Wilkinson’s music brings together and entwines the different moods of the film. There is a lovely, sweeping theme in the strings, all Vaughan Williams pastoral romanticism, with hints of old folk tunes at its heart. Curling around it like a parasitic vine is a serpentine, descending theme with no definite tonal centre. It’s both intoxicatingly beautiful and disconcertingly off-kilter, the dying fall of a leaf spiralling to the ground. This theme is played on the Ondes Martenot, and early electronic keyboard instrument which was a favourite of the French composer Olivier Messiaen. There’s certainly something in Wilkinson’s score of the woozy, reeling Ondes Martenot love theme from Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony, heard in the Chant D’Amour sections. The cimbalom is also used as a resonantly ringing shadow tinting the music at various points. The cimbalom is an Eastern European hammered dulcimer. It has often been used in soundtracks to indicate the incursion of something other, a shadowy presence from elsewhere stealing unnoticed into familiar surroundings. It was used as such in many a Cold War spy movie, to the point where it became something of a cliché.

Wilkinson’s gorgeous score, which has happily been released on Trunk Records, accompanies a title sequence of great beauty. The credits are placed within framing curves and arcs of thorns and winter branches, furled ferns and spent seedheads. The separate shots resemble book plates or illuminated chapter headings in some exquisite folio edition, pages with decorated margins. The title sequence leads us to anticipate something quite special, an expectation which the title had singularly failed to raise.

Vermeer interiors - Margaret's tale

There are, naturally, some shortcomings attendant upon a film made on a very limited budget and timescale. The original plan had been for an omnibus film in the Amicus mould, with three stories taking place in different historical periods. Writer Robert Wynne-Simmons duly produced three separate tales, only for the producers to change their minds and decide that they wanted a single story set in the 17th century. Michael Reeves’ film Witchfinder General had been a big success for Tigon, and this was now considered to be a marketable period. Harshly realistic historical horror set in a pre-industrial rural England was, Tony Tenser and his partners decided, the new thing. The joins between the three patched-together stories still show to a certain degree, although the story still forms a coherent whole. In fact, it inadvertently displays the classic three act structure recommended by the gurus of formulaic Hollywood scriptwriting. Part one is the tale of Peter and his bride to be, and largely takes place in the farmhouse and its attic. Part two concerns the growth of the cult and its effect on Ellen and her children. It takes veers between her cottage, the woodland and its makeshift shrine and the village church. It’s also the tale of Cathy and the loss of innocence, of childhood’s end. Part three concerns the hunting down of the cult, and takes place in farmhouse and barn, village, woodland, lakeside and a chalk pit, against whose crumbling white cliffs Angel, in her soiled white shift, appears all the more like a desperate, fallen incarnation of her given name. It is also the pitiful tale of Margaret (Michelle Dotrice), who finds herself exiled from the cult and from Angel’s favours. Margaret is at the centre of the one scene which directly emulates the tone and subject matter of Witchfinder General. She is ‘ducked’ in a lake in the middle of a pine wood. This is a brief diversion to Black Park in Bucks, a home counties location familiar from dozens of Hammer films, in whose waters an unfamiliar victim is often found floating.

Angel as genius loci of the chalk pits

The comparison with Witchfinder General is an interesting one. Blood on Satan’s Claw actually takes place at a later date than the Civil War period in which Reeves’ film was set, and a significant shift in attitudes has taken place. The days of hysterical accusations are over, and the persecution of ‘witches’ is seen as a historical aberration. The clothes of Mistress Banham’s husband, who we are told died 10 years ago, hang from the rafters in the attic gathering dust, and represent an era of history being packed away along with the culture and beliefs which went with it. These old-fashioned garments have the haunting quality of any clothes hung in storage, empty of the bodies which once inhabited them. The Judge, dwells at his leisure in Mistress Banham’s farmhouse, and it is made plain that they were intimate acquaintances in the past. He raises a glass to ‘his Catholic Majesty King James III in exile’, adding ‘may God keep him in France’. It’s an ambiguously phrased toast from a measured and enlightened man who chooses his words carefully, and it leaves us none the wiser as to whose side (if any) he’s on. It places the period as post the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William of Orange and his wife to the throne of England, displacing the hugely unpopular Catholic monarch James II. James bore a son in the self-same year, and naturally enough called him James. When James II died in 1701 in France, his son became the exiled pretender to the throne, the James III in question. So Blood on Satan’s Claw can be considered to take place in the early 18th century. The last witches to be executed in England are generally thought to be the 3 ‘Bideford Biddies’, who were tried and found guilty in Exeter in 1682. The trial was a considerable embarrassment to the judiciary, who believed the charges to be superstitious nonsense but bowed to the strength of local opinion. The superstitions and folkloric hearsay which fuelled it were dying out even in such benighted corners of the country, however.

The Judge as Enlightenment scourge

The Judge in Blood on Satan’s Claw is deeply sceptical about the return of what he terms the ‘old superstitions’, and is a man of the dawning age of enlightenment. When Peter suggests that ‘there’s evil in this house’, the Judge takes a firmly rationalist stance and advises him ‘you must cleanse your mind of such fancies’. Peter later visits him in London to inform him of the grim developments in the village, and tells him that ‘witchcraft has returned’, the implication being that it has been absent from people’s minds for some time. The Judge remains sceptical, however. When he does return to mete out justice, he declares ‘I mean to run this devil of yours to earth, if he exists’, and demands some form of evidence before he proceeds. Once he has that evidence, however, he becomes a terrible scourging angel, coming not to bring peace, but with a sword; and a huge ceremonial cruciform one at that. There is also a sense in which he is burning away the last remnants of the old magical thinking, making way for a new world of scientific rationalism which will disperse the shadows of the 17th century and the bedevilled medieval mindset in its clear, illuminating light.

Howard Goorney, Barry Andrews and Charlotte Mitchell

The cast of Blood on Satan’s Claw has an interesting genre pedigree. Several had appeared in Hammer films. Barry Andrews worked in the archetypal Hammer tavern in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, whilst Linda Hayden played one of the daughters of the trio of hypocritical Victorian patriarchs who were wooed over to the dark side by Christopher Lee’s Count in Taste the Blood of Dracula. Howard Goorney, who plays the very 1970s doctor, had made a very minor incursion into the world of Hammer, playing a drunk in the 1964 movie The Evil of Frankenstein. This was the film in which Hammer misguidedly tried to reappropriate the Jack Pierce Karloff look for the monster. Goorney was a graduate of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, and went on to write an invaluable history, The Theatre Workshop Story, which drew on personal reminiscences as well as interviews with the actors he had worked with.

Wendy Padbury as Cathy

There’s a double Dr Who connection. Wendy Padbury (Cathy) played the longstanding companion Zoe alongside Patrick Troughton’s Doctor in the 1960s, whilst Anthony Ainley would go on to play the re-incarnation of the Doctor’s nemesis The Master from the latter episodes of the Tom Baker era through to the very last ‘classic Who’ story Survival opposite Sylvester McCoy. Patrick Wymark was also in the running to play the regenerated Doctor in the 60s. Blood on Satan’s Claw was to be his last film, and he died before it was released in the cinemas. He gives a strong and characterful performance in defiance of his poor state of health. He’d appeared in Witchfinder General, and was also in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, a Tony Tenser production from the pre-Tigon days of Compton Films. Michelle Dotrice plays Satan’s disciple a couple of years before she entered the nation’s hearts as Betty, the long-suffering wife of Frank Spencer in the immensely popular sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Her breathy invocation ‘hail Behemoth, spirit of the dark. Take thou my blood, my flesh, my skin and walk’ was sampled and used to great effect on the stirring track Scarlet Ceremony on the Ghost Box album The Owl’s Map by Belbury Poly, which gives an idea of the kind of territory in which the film has exerted a pervasive influence.

Milton Reid patiently waits his call

Milton Reid, the Judge’s implacable enforcer, was an interesting character too. Born in India of an English father and Indian mother, he moved to England in his teens and became a professional wrestler after the war. He also took small parts in films, his imposing frame and bulldog head making for a striking onscreen presence. He invariably played stone-faced executioners, intimidating genies or other Arabian Nights heavies (and you can imagine him leaning on an unfeasibly large scimitar), or standard issue mute thugs. He was highly effective in these supporting roles, creating an immediate and lasting impression, and adopting a less is more approach to acting. He really just had to be there. He was in the splendid Hammer smuggling swashbuckler Captain Clegg, which featured Peter Cushing at his dashing, athletic peak (an English Errol Flynn in his day), and was later in Dr Phibes Rises Again and The People That Time Forgot, the Amicus follow-up to the Michael Moorcock-scripted Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation The Land That Time Forgot. Robin Davies, who plays Cathy’s brother Mark, had just appeared in the TV series Catweazle, set on another farm. He played Carrot, the farmer’s son who befriends the tetchy wizard and introduces him to the bewildering magic of the modern world into which he has fallen. He also turned up earlier as one of the ‘scum’ knocking up a fry-up in the lower levels of the emblematic school in Lindsay Anderson’s If…

Robin Davies

Director Piers Haggard never quite matched the strange and potent magic of Blood on Satan’s Claw in his subsequent work, although the 1979 Quatermass serial with John Mills again makes highly evocative use of the English rural landscape. He seems proud to have created a film which has built up such a lasting cult reputation over the years, though. It’s a reputation which is well deserved.

What's It All About?

Film, music, art and literature, with a leaning towards the fantastic in all its forms: Science fiction, fantasy, horror, the surreal, the Absurd, the Weird ('New' and old), the hauntologised and the just plain odd. West Country sightings reported, with regular return trips to London on film likely. In short, anything that sets the sparks a-crackling and fizzing through the old grey jelly.